[VIDEO] Hello, Smart Home: Emily

Welcome to our second installment of “Hello, Smart Home,” a new video series where we head inside customers’ houses and apartments to see how they’re using SmartThings to secure their homes, gain peace of mind, and fit their lifestyle.

How To:
Emily keeps her SmartThings Hub in her living room. From this central location, it can easily reach the SmartThings sensors she keeps throughout her kitchen, bar area, and bedroom.

Emily shares her SmartThings account with her roommate so that they can each monitor and control their apartment. Sharing your account is easy: Just go to the “Home & Family” section of the Dashboard, add a new person, and then invite them to share your account. They’ll receive an e-mail invitation. Once they download the SmartThings app to their iOS or Android phone, they’ll see instructional screens that guide them through how to use SmartThings.

Emily and her roommate keep a SmartSense Multi sensor on the front door and they each get notifications when the other person arrives back home each day. Here’s how they’ve set this up:

Emily also triggers her Sonos wireless stereo system to play a custom message when she arrives back home. Here’s how to do this:

Emily has the Crock-Pot in her kitchen plugged into a SmartPower Outlet so that she can start heating her dinner when she’s still at work, and arrive back home to a warm meal. (Editor’s note: We love this feature, and it sort of makes you feel like you have a personal butler.) Here’s how she does this:

In what might be one of our favorite SmartThings use cases to date, Emily has triggered her Sonos to guard her basil plant from her unruly cat by making it sound like there’s a pack of feral dogs. This is also a really great and effective way to guard your home if SmartThings senses unexpected motion while you’re out. Here’s how to set this up:

Want to use SmartThings to control your Philips hue lights? Easy:

And finally, Emily uses the Hello, Home feature of SmartThings to make it more comfortable for her to sleep by automatically performing multiple actions at night and in the morning. Here’s how to do it:

It would still be cool to have a page to share usage ideas and things we are doing with SmartThings. The picture page is cool, but it doesn’t let people share what they are doing. Like Emily’s Hue lights at the bar or her Sonos usage. Or my usage of the ZigBee outlets to reboot my WiFi at home when I’m away, etc. There’s so many things we can do, and to share these ideas would let us all expand upon our use of SmartThings.

Josh

Look into IFTTT, lots of ideas there and it allows far more expansive use of Smartthings and other home automation tools.

Arch

Who does she think she’s fooling? There’s blatantly nothing in that crockpot!